In Depth Recruiting of Filipino Virtual Assistants - Part 2 - Course Video 8 - John Jonas

Okay, so let's talk about when you're gonna browse through resumes and contact workers. So I'll give you some tips about this. And some of these tips are going to apply also to posting jobs. So the first thing is be specific, but not too specific. So we find people that when they contact workers, they want to tell them everything about their business in the beginning, and they tell them, Here are the 14 different tasks you'll be doing. And it scares Filipino workers off, because if they find one of those 14 that they can't do, they think they're unqualified, they don't want to let you down, so they won't even respond. Another thing to be careful of is I often see employers who make the mistake of saying, they'll send me an email saying, hey, John, I'm shortlisting my candidates right now, and I'm narrowing it down to two or three, and that's the wrong approach. Filipinos are super loyal. So if they already have a job and you email them, they're likely to not even respond to you because they already have a job and they're loyal to that employer. So rather than trying to shortlist your candidates first and then contact them, try contacting, like, 30 workers and seeing who responds to you. And when you do this, you don't need to filter through their resume super well. In the beginning, you should definitely do some sorting and filtering, but send lots of lots of contacts first. And then when people respond, then shortlist them and get rid of the ones who aren't good and keep the ones who are good, and then go through your interview process with them. Something else to do when you're a contacting worker is to be unique. You know, a lot of these workers are getting a lot of contact from employers. There are a lot of people trying to hire Filipinos right now. And if you're just sending them a form letter every time, they're likely to think, oh, this is just spam, and I'm not going to respond to this. So try and be unique in what you tell people. So I want to show you a couple examples of this, of things that I have done to help you do this better. Here's an email that I sent to a bunch of people. This is the contact that I sent. I said, I found your Resume on Onlinejobs pH, which is not a great subject. But then I said, I know, I know. This is a mass email. It's going to 12 of you. So this tells them, I'm a real person. When I say I know, I know this is a mass email and basically I'm saying I'm sorry, but they at least know that I'm real. And then I tell them this is going to 12 of you. So I didn't send this to a million people and you should know that I am actually offering a job, but there's competition for this job. The thing is I have two job openings for writers and your resume said you're interested in job writing articles. So there's some specifics there, but not too specific with all my employment policies and I say are you interested? Did you already find a job? Please reply and let me know if you're interested. So that's one example of what I have sent to people. Here's another one. The subject was sorry for the mass email and this is something you can't do, but I could. I said, but I own onlinejobs Ph just trying to be unique, trying to stand out from everybody else. And I said so I know you get mass emails like this from onlinejobs ph employers. I know because I'm the one who gets the complaints because I own onlinejobs. Obviously I'm a again, trying to be unique here, but I'm sending this mass email to 13 of you because I'm looking to hire two writers. I don't want to waste your time. The job will be very writing intensive. If you're interested, reply and let me know. Then I'll follow up with you. So I'm trying to give them some specifics about it's an intensive writing job, but I didn't give them too much to scare them away. So after you do this and you get responses from people, here are a couple of suggestions. Number one, ask lots of questions and I'm going to give you a whole bunch of questions. You can ask things that I ask and then respond to everybody. Even though their first contact back to you may not be the best, may not look like the best candidate, I still respond to them unless they make some serious mistakes, which I'll show you. Let me show you a couple emails that I have responded to people with, give you examples of what I do as I respond to them and I'll show you that some of these have been really, really successful for me. So this first one, this is this guy's name was Matteo. He turned out to be an absolute rock star. And the first two questions I asked, he sent me back an email and the two questions I asked, what other jobs do you have and how much time could you spend working for Me. So one of the things I always ask is do you have another job? And the reason I ask that is because they don't know if they should respond and say yes or if they should say no because I might want them to say yes, meaning you're a good employee or I might want them to say no meaning you can work for me. And so I almost always ask that question then how much time could you spend working for me is a good indicator of if they have another job. Can they spend. If they tell me they can work 40 hours a week but they have another job, I have a problem with that. This guy had a resume on Elance and Odesk and I saw that and so I was also asking him more about that. How much contract work are you doing? In the end he wasn't doing very much and so he turned out really great. Here's a couple other emails I've sent to other people. In response, her email back to me said how much writing will it be? And I said it will be writing five articles a day. The topics will be varied. It'll be centered on a single topic at a time. And then here's some more of my questions. Can you please send me a link to your onlinejobs ph profile? I could go find her profile but I want her to send it to me. I want her to tell me where it is. And that does two things. Number one, it makes it easier for me so I don't have to go find the profile. Number two, it shows me is she paying attention? And I'll get into that a little bit more. Can you tell me your experience in writing articles? Do you love to write? Can you do a job writing all day because. Just because they're Filipino, just because they're an outsourcer, just because you're giving them a job doesn't mean they want to write all day long or it doesn't mean they want to do link building all day long or it doesn't mean they want to do whatever data entry task all day long. And so I'm a little bit sensitive to that. Can you do this for a long time? Another email. The writing on your blog is impressive. She's headed to law school. Are those still your plans? I'm trying to feel her out and see and I'll do this with every single person. I want to know what are you doing in life? Because I want to hire a long term employee. So here's some more jobs. I know you're interested in the job. How much are you looking to make? How much are you looking to work? What other jobs do you have? How much do you work there? Let's continue. Here's another response I sent to someone. Can you send me a link to your online jobs profile? How much are you looking to make? Do you have another job? Do you have your own computer? And Internet is another option. You'll notice I'm not asking all of these questions all at once to people. I'm sending these in separate emails. I have a good reason for that. Here's another one. Can you work full time? If not, how many hours can you work? How much you looking to make? Can you send me a link to your profile? Will you work from home or from an Internet cafe? Do you have other jobs? How many hours do you work? Here's another one. This is a an initial email that I sent out and I have some questions in it. I'm just going to get to these questions actually. Let me go through the beginning. You'll notice how I sent them some details but I didn't send too much. My job openings for a full time graphic designer webmaster. It will entail doing layouts using whatever tools you want and then turn that into HTML css. So I'm not saying oh I need you to use Photoshop and then I need you to use Dreamweaver and we don't use Adobe Premiere. So if you use that, don't apply. I didn't say that. I just want them to know this is a job doing webmaster work, graphic design and turning it into HTML and css. If you're interested, answer these questions. How long have you been doing design work? Send me three references of your best. I only want to see stuff you've personally designed because often people will send you work that maybe they didn't do the design but they did the HTML. And so I want to know specifically what you have designed, a link to your profile, how much you're looking to make. Do you have another job? Have you worked for foreign employers before? That's a different, different question. Here's another reply that I sent. I wanted you to notice that I've asked this person to do a simple job for me specifically this is a designer. And I told them at the end I'll still pay you for the job even if I don't end up hiring you. And I've done this quite a few times where I get down to three candidates. I don't know which one's going to be the best. So I'll say, you know, I have A simple job for you. I'm asking three different people to do this job. I'm going to pay you all regardless. But I may not hire you and usually they'll all do it. And then I will pay them. So that's an option as you recruit people. Here's a couple others that I've sent to people. I'm looking for a full time developer. You have this and this experience. Do you have that experience is part of this. Can you send me samples? Are you available? I have two. I'm hiring for two jobs. Here's another example of another question I've asked people. I'm looking for someone to write, to work full time. I expect you to not have another job. If you're interested, please write one paragraph of why I should hire you. I want to test your English skills. That's basically what I'm looking for here. So I have. And then I say, don't send me a list of your past experience. I want you to describe it to me. I want to see how well you write. So one of the things I've had people do is, for example, I've had them write, there's a company who is filling people's dreams. I want you to write me in four sentences or less what your dream day would be. What would you have them do for you? And then. And you only have four sentences. So if they write me more than four sentences, I have a problem with it. They're not following my instructions. And then I can see how creative they are and how good they are with their, with their English. So here are a couple others when. Just more questions that I've asked. Where are you? In the Philippines. How long are the power outages there? How are the power outages? Will you be able to work full time? Do you have your own computer? Did you write the last response to me yourself? Did someone else help you with it? And that one I don't remember. But it may have been because something I felt, something fishy. You should follow your gut instinct here. Otherwise it may have just been something I came up with just to see what they would say. When could you start? How fast is your Internet connection? Lots of questions here. And there are some really good reasons for it. So here's. Here's one more that I wanted you to. I wanted you to know this just so you could understand how Filipinos are. This was his response to me. He said, kindest regards from John. And he says, weird, we have the same name. Filipinos are very into being personal. And he's trying to be personal with me. And if you're very corporate with them, it kind of turns them off. And so if the more friendly you can be and you'll notice that a lot of these I'm pretty friendly with things, I think you'll have a better response from them. So in sending all these questions to them and sending them over multiple times, here's what I have found. This has kind of been one of my secrets to success in recruiting. I get to see how this person works in the recruiting process. So when they reply to me, I can see how consistently are they checking their email. If they're responding every single day, that's pretty consistent. And I like that. If they're not responding every day and it takes them a couple days to respond to me, chances of them taking a couple days to respond after I've hired them are pretty good. And I don't like that. I can also see over a period of time, how is their English, how much knowledge do they have? If I'm talking to a programmer, I can tell based on his language how good of a programmer he really is, or a webmaster or a designer. Based on the word to use and the assumptions he makes in responding to me, I can tell how good he is. And so that's why I want to send lots of questions over lots of emails. Another thing I can tell from lots of emails and asking lots of questions is how detail oriented is this person? So one of the questions I didn't show you is I will often ask, will you please attach a picture of a pink Cadillac to your next email or attach a picture of a single banana to your next email? Which is ridiculous. It's a silly question to ask. However, if they're willing to send it, I know they're paying attention to details. If they're not willing to send it, why would they pay attention to details after I hire them if they're not willing to do it when I'm recruiting them? And so I'll ask silly questions like that and sometimes what the best response is when. When they tell me, why do you want a picture of a pink Cadillac? That doesn't make any sense. When someone's willing to ask me a question and question me, I love it. Because that means when they're working for me, they're willing to speak up and say, I don't think something's right here. And so that's a really great response. I love that response. So in doing all this, this is where you're going to find out. This is where you're going to have your best success in hiring rock star workers is if you're willing to spend the time in recruiting. So I have a couple of things that I wanted to make sure I mentioned here. As you narrow it down, pay attention to your intuition. How do you feel about this worker? Because sometimes I just get a yucky feeling and when I've done that and I've hired them anyway, it has not been a good experience. You can look for their inconsistencies. If they're inconsistencies in their resume, what they say on onlinejobs ph versus what they're telling you in their emails that'll tell you, that'll give you a red flag. Are they working for other people? You know, for me I want them working for me. I want them only working for me. I know that they're going to be more committed and this isn't a hard and fast rule. They don't only have to work for you, but I just find it's a better experience if they are. I also want to look for their grammar. Is their grammar okay or is it great? And depending on what I'm hiring for, I want great grammar Also. Another thing that I might look for is professionally crafted responses. Someone that might be a little bit too good at responding might tell me that they're a professional worker. Meaning they're trying to work for eight different employers. They're spending 18 hours a day working but they're only spending two hours a day at each person and that's not a good situation. Another thing that I'm looking for is does this person have too many skills? Are they saying that they can do too much? That I don't like that? Have they had lots of jobs in the past working for foreign employers? That's kind of a red flag to me. If you've had lots of jobs, why didn't they work out? Because most people in onlinejobs ph are looking to hire a full time permanent worker and if you've had five other jobs, something's not working out with those other employers and I don't want to spend my time with someone that's not going to work out. Another thing that I like to look for is can you work full time? Because to me I really want to hire full time workers. Now I have a couple part time workers that work for me but my goal with them is to get them to quit their other jobs and work full time for me. Because full time workers are generally, I've mentioned this, it's just Better in the end, I want to know, does it feel right? Does this, does this feel good hiring this person? Am I excited about it or am I hesitant about it? How does my gut feel as I go through this? And you'll notice that you'll feel these things as you hire. And if something's wrong, I'm going to spend a lot more time recruiting and maybe back off because I've had enough experience where I just hire anyway and it doesn't turn out right. So for a couple of minutes, I want to talk about posting a job instead of just contacting workers. Now, a lot of what I've talked about applies to posting a job because once you get responses from applicants, now you're doing this recruiting process that I've just been through with you. When you're posting a job, it is important that, like I mentioned before, you don't scare people away. And it's even more important when you post a job than when you're just contacting workers. Because you'll get workers looking at your job post and they'll read it, and then if they feel like, oh, I can't do that, they'll move on. Because it's not the only email in their inbox when you've contacted them. They have lots of other jobs to look at and apply to. Also, if you don't add some specifics, like, I've seen employers that say, make the last word of your email autocomplete, just add it at the end of your response to me just to see are you willing to pay attention to directions. And if you don't include autocomplete at the end of your email, I'm not paying attention to you. I'm not going to do anything. I'm not even going to look at your response because you'll get a lot of form letters back. People who are applying to 50 different jobs just trying to get a job, and they may not be qualified to your job. And that's a good way to weed them out. So another thing that you can do in this is I have a friend that says when he posts a job, he says, please apply by video. And you know, most Filipinos have a computer, they have a cell phone, they have some way of getting a camera on their face. And he wants them to say specific things in their video and then send him a video. Maybe they post it on YouTube and send it back to him. And that's a good way to see this person and get a good feel of their English and to see a lot of Filipinos just aren't willing to do that. They're not willing to. To make a video. They're too scared and that. So that's an option. I will sometimes record a video, a gin video, and put it in my. In the email that I send to people so they get a feeling for me in the beginning. And maybe what I say will scare them off and then I don't. I wouldn't want to work with that person. Or maybe what I say, they'll really connect with it. Video, I think, is often a good way make a connection with someone. And it's so easy today to do that. Okay, so now that we've talked about how to start the recruiting process and how to follow through the recruiting process, I want to talk about what you do at the very beginning of it. So as soon as I hire someone, I'm giving them a single task. And with that task, I want them to focus on that one thing. I'm not going to give them a whole bunch of tasks that they're going to work on. I don't want to say, hey, here are these four things. Go do these things. What's really important in the very beginning, and I'll talk about this in the next video, is that you follow up with them all one single thing and get them good at that one thing. It'll really make a difference in the process of transitioning from recruiting to working. It'll give them a solid foundation to work with you. It'll help you focus on one thing with them so that as you move forward, you have success with this. So I'll continue to talk about hiring in the next video. A couple last tips on recruiting. Once you have someone working for you as you move forward and you're ready to hire someone else, ask them who they know. It's surprising how many people they know. Maybe they won't have someone for you and you'll need to come back and recruit again, but maybe they will. If they do, I would suggest you go through a similar recruiting process with their worker. They've probably already done it for you, but I suggest you do it again just to establish the same base of communication so you know if they're going to be fast with you, if they're going to pay attention to details, I really recommend that you do that. You can also have them do the recruiting process for you. I have a girl now that recruits for me, so I'll say, I need this kind of a worker. Can you find me three different candidates that have passed this entire recruiting process, and that's a little bit further down the road. Once you have numerous people working for you, but that's an option, they'll recruit for you, and some of them are really good at it. So if you'll follow the steps that I've talked about here, it'll make your ability to find good workers from the start a lot easier. So I've read quite a few posts in forums and stuff from people that say hire slow, fire fast. And that's their philosophy, is if someone doesn't work out in the beginning, they're gonna fire them right away. And what I have found is if I go through this recruiting process really well with people, I almost never need to let someone go because I've spent enough time with them ahead of time to know this is gonna work out. And I know their personality and I know their skills and I know their willingness to work hard before I even hire them, and that makes a really big difference in their ability to be a rock star worker.